Double Your Profit Day #15 How to Raise Standards & Boost Performance

Welcome to Day 15 of the Double Your Profit Series — the go-to profit series for contractors, home service owners, and small business entrepreneurs.
Today, we’re talking about one of the most important — and most overlooked — levers in your business: Tightening Your Standards.

🧠 If you’ve ever wondered why performance slips or why “good enough” starts to spread… it’s probably because your standards aren’t as clear (or enforced) as you think.
 You get what you allow. And if you allow low standards, you’ll get low performance.

💡 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Why performance defaults to the lowest standard you tolerate
• How to set crystal-clear expectations for behavior and results
• The power of documenting and sharing your standards across every role
• How scorecards and job descriptions can reinforce your culture daily
• Why even high performers need to meet all standards — not just hit numbers
• When (and how) to react fast to protect your culture
• Real-world example: letting go of a top producer who didn’t meet behavioral expectations

💼 This Episode is Brought to You By Avoca AI
Looking to train your call center and improve technician performance?
Avoca AI helps teams identify issues, improve call quality, and drive results from start to finish.

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⚙️ Standards are the foundation of performance. Set them clearly, communicate them constantly, and enforce them quickly. Anything less — and your culture will drift.

🔥 Think of this episode as your blueprint for building a high-accountability, high-performance team that represents your business the way you want.

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John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies
Jack Carr, CEO of Rapid HVAC

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Transcript

 Welcome back to the Double Your Profit Series. Today we are talking about tightening your standards. The way I like to think about this is you get what you allow. Performance will happen for whatever the lowest set of standards that you allow to happen. So when you. Our starting to set standards. Here's a couple ground rules to help figure it out for your team.

First one, be clear and concise. We have to have a goal. We have to have a written documented. This is my standard, so my standard is uniform shirts, somewhat clean hair. Don't smell like you drank your breakfast. You could have performance metrics in there like number of jobs a day. Average closing rate, average ticket, total performance.

You can add really anything in there that you want, but the important part here is setting clear and consistent expectations. And if you don't set those, then you're going to get low performance because people really don't know what they should be aiming for. Once you've sort of done that initial groundwork of documenting what you expect on a per person basis, what you wanna then do is start sharing it as broadly as you can.

We put it into every single job description. We put it into every single one-on-one that a manager had with their team member. We put scorecards using those metrics all over the office. We speak with the managers on how their team's doing. We speak with the managers with how they're doing. We're constantly using the scorecards that we created that are the standards that we've set.

And if someone dips below those standards on a performance or qualitative, how they're acting inside the home, how they're acting around the office, we have a very clear guideline for what we expect. We had an example a couple months ago where we had a high perform. Someone that was doing great numbers.

So on the performance side of their job, they were doing excellent, but how they were acting inside the home did not really align with the standards that we've set. Like we want a minimum five star reviews. We want good customer experience. We want someone to represent our business the way that. We would want it to be represented, and this person was not doing that.

So despite having great performance, they missed the other expectations that we had for them. So we had to let 'em go because they were not representing us in the way that we would've wanted. Leadership sets the bar here, and that's from the top of the org chart to your senior leaders or your frontline leaders, but what they allow will become the culture.

My final. Thought on standards and expectations is react fast. If someone is doing something that is clearly counter to the type of behaviors that you want on your team, then you need to enforce and react fast. Now, reacting doesn't need to be termination. Reacting can be coaching, reacting can be mentoring.

It can be giving them a peer mentor that is doing the type of behaviors or performance that you want. But the biggest mistake that companies make is they wait too long. To attack a problem because they're uncomfortable with it. So what happens when that guy missed his number? What happened when that guy said that something a little bit weird at the customer's house?

How do you handle it and how do you train it? And that's where the leadership side of this really comes out. The leaders are the ones enforcing these standards, and you have to react fast so that you can continue to create the culture of accountability that you're striving for, but you can also keep great guys that probably just need a little bit of help in that moment.

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